Who cares what your title is? All that matters is what you do.
 
Titles are signaling mechanisms. They are supposed to indicate to others what you’re responsible for or capable of doing. They aren’t meant to be boxes that limit what you do.
 
Is there something you think should be fixed at Students For Liberty? Go ahead and fix it.
 
Is there something you think could be improved in the liberty movement? Go out and make the improvement.
 
Is there something you want to launch in your organization that isn’t being done? Following any appropriate protocol, go out and do it.
 
If you’re worried more about your titles than what you’re able to do, you’re worried about others more than yourself.
 
What matters most to organizations are what the people in it do, not what title they hold. An organization can have any number of people who hold “senior,” “director,” or “vice president” titles. It doesn’t matter if an organization has 2 or 200 individuals with these titles. What matters is what the people in the organization are able to accomplish.
 
Added bonus: The sooner you worry less about your title and more about what you’re doing, the sooner you’ll see your title “improve”.

Office Space
 
Last week, I toured 5 San Francisco coworking spaces to see if I wanted to work out of any of them whenever I am in the city. The process of deciding what kind of office space I want for myself got me to thinking about the nature of office space in general. The result is this blog post.
 
Purpose of an Office
Why does the office exist? There are three principal purposes of offices:

1. Productivity – An office is a place where people work. Having a separate space from where you reside helps shift your attention from the personal to the professional. It puts you in a different frame of mind. For even the most theoretical professions, some physical items are needed to do work. An office is a place to keep those physical items, utilize them, and organize your work.
2. Collaboration – An office is a place where you can work with others. This may happen privately, with the purpose of having meetings or doing work without the prying eyes/ears of outsiders. But, paradoxically, an office may also be a place to do public work, where you can invite outsiders to share in your efforts.
3. Signaling – An office is a status symbol. It represents what the organization does and well it is doing. It does so both to the employees, as well as to the outside world.

The first two reasons are perhaps the most important to consider when choosing/creating an office. You want a space that allows people to work, both with others, and by themselves. However, the last purpose, Signaling, should not be brushed aside as irrelevant or superficial. I used to think that nonprofit organizations who spent money on expensive buildings that seemed to have wallpaper “lined with dollars” were frivolously wasting money. But, there are some nonprofits who can justifiably do this because they are trying to influence individuals who take the ability to acquire funds seriously (e.g. politicians). More broadly, people should take pride in their work; a dilapidated office signals a lack of pride in one’s work, which signals lack of quality in one’s work. If an office is going to be messy, run down, or the kind of place you don’t want others to enter, there better be a good reason for it rather than (a) not being able to have a nice office or (b) you don’t care about what office you’re in.
 
Implications for Large Teams
Building on the priority of productivity and collaboration in office spaces, there are 4 key questions to consider when selecting or creating an office space:

1. How do people work together?
2. How do people work alone?
3. How do you incorporate outsiders into the organization?
4. What physical items do you need to get your work done?

After answering these questions, a 5th might be added that draws in the Signaling mechanism of an office: What impression do you want to give to outsiders about the organization? Some organizations may want to show off the money they have to impress outsiders. Others may want to show their humility and resourcefulness by keeping more modest surroundings. 

When answering these questions, it's important to keep in mind three things:

1. There is no such thing an ideal office space. The ideal office will vary for each organization. What is an ideal office for an organization one year may not be ideal three years later as the organization changes. And there's no way to construct an office that everyone will agree is ideal. 
2. There are trade-offs in determining what kind of office you want to create and what you are capable of creating. Whether due to financial restrictions, conflicts between the different interests above or different stakeholders for the organization, or what kind of space is available, we make due with what is available to us at any given time.
3. An office both reflects and determines the culture of an organization. When asking yourself the 5 questions above, it's important to keep this in mind as culture is what unifies each of them together.

Sources of Inspiration
Looking around at already existing offices, there are a number of features that I think are worth considering from different types of work spaces.

1. Phone Booths – Co-working spaces value open space, but recognize the need for people to have private conversations, as well. They have small rooms that look like old-time phone booths where people can have private phone calls and meetings.
2. Networking Events – Co-working spaces also tend to have many events for their members to meet one another, share ideas, learn from leaders in diverse industries,
3. Encourage Meetings – Rumor has it that when designing the Pixar offices, Steve Jobs was so intent on encouraging meetings between employees from different teams that he wanted only two bathrooms for the several hundred employees: one men’s room, one women’s room. The logic: everyone has to go to the bathroom during the day. If there are only two bathrooms, people are more likely to meet one another, talk, and come up with new ideas.
4. Stupidity of Cubicles – Cubicles are the butts of so many jokes for a reason. They were a terrible idea, a halfway between private offices and open space for collaboration.
5. Artisans – Old school artisan workshops provided space for people to work on products on their own, but for master craftsmen to observe what they’re doing, provide feedback, and assist in improving them. The ability to see what someone is doing and work on it with them, rather than just hear about what they’re doing or talk about what they ought to do is an unfortunate rarity in today’s world.
6. Perks for Staying Late – Many professional firms and tech companies offer perks to encourage employees to stay late like free dinners, free rides home, and more. The goal is to incentivize people to stay at the office longer, and so be productive longer.
7. Minimize Decisions – Mark Zuckerberg has said that the reason Facebook offers so many perks to employees like elaborate meals is to remove the number of decisions people make. Building up on recent research that humans experience decision fatigue (the more decisions people make, the more difficult it is for them to make decisions), this could be an effective tactic to allow people to invest their energy on the decisions that are best for the company.
8. Libraries in Academia – Even though colleges and universities tend to have large libraries containing vast quantities of books, periodicals, and other publications of intellectual value, most departments have their own libraries as well. These may contain additional works not available in the main library, but perhaps more importantly, the works are more easily accessed by members of the department, making it easier for them to use the ideas. Facilitating employees' access to information ought to be a priority of any office space, as well.

Conclusion
There is no conclusion here. This is the start of an ongoing thought process regarding how to create the best office space possible for myself, organizations I'm involved with, and others.